


A Study of Flowers

by laurelsblue



Category: Naruto
Genre: Character Study, Families of Choice, Gen, Growing Up Senju, Minor Canonical Character(s), One-Sided Relationship, Pre-Canon, Pre-Konoha, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-22
Updated: 2011-02-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:15:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurelsblue/pseuds/laurelsblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Touka's childhood might have been like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Study of Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Gift for nthcoincident's birthday. It's not the Izuna/Touka I keep promising you but hopefully it's okay.

This is the way it begins. A girl drops the bucket of water she's carrying on a boy's carefully-tended garden. They struggle to save the seedlings together but cannot. Apologies come thick and fast.  
   
Or maybe it started before then. A boy knocks a girl over as he races for the gate and his returning father. He doesn't stop to apologise.  
   
Probably it began even earlier. A man presents a girl who can barely stand to the clan head. His sons peer curiously at her and she stares back fearlessly.  
   
Touka isn't sure. As far as she can remember, she's always known Hashirama and Tobirama.  
   
She dogs their heels as a child, following them everywhere she can. They scramble up trees and she stands at the bottom, waiting for them to come down. They disappear off to the practice areas and she follows them, watching them train. The sounds of her childhood are the rustling of leaves and the thud of kunai or shuriken. It's a comforting rhythm.  
   
There are other children she could follow of course, the Senju are numerous after all, but they don't interest her in the same way. Even at that age, she knows Hashirama and Tobirama are different to the rest.  
   
It doesn't take long before people start referring to her as their shadow.  
   
When she grows, she grows fast. The height difference is still there but it's not as great. Soon, they start paying attention to her. They fit her hands around blunted kunai and shuriken, teaching her how to throw them. They correct her stance roughly, hitting her feet lightly when she moves them.  
   
They teach her how to use exploding tags and give her some of theirs to practice with. She spends the following week blowing up targets until they run out.  
   
She learns to read and she tries to make her own exploding tags but they blow up in her face no matter what she tries. Eventually, Hashirama sits her next to him and guides her through the sequence needed. She makes him a hundred for his birthday in order to thank him, spending hours writing and rewriting them.  
   
She casts her first genjutsu when she is seven. It's a simple auditory one, used for distracting enemies. By the time she's nine, she's inventing her own, increasingly more complicated, ones.  
   
Puberty is marked by the realisation that she's hopelessly in love with Hashirama. Unfortunately, that comes coupled with the realisation that _he_ is hopelessly in love with Uzumaki Mito. Naturally, Touka hates her guts and naturally, no one wants to listen to her detailed explanation of why Mito is clearly an Uchiha in disguise because why else would her hair look so perfect _all the time_. Hashirama composes haiku to it, for the Sage's sake. (No one would ever write poetry about Touka's hair. She's never even had a 'it looks nice' before.)  
   
Her first battlefield is a hazy mess in her mind. The war with the Uchiha had taken a turn for the worse and she's put on a recon squad which gets assigned to scout an enemy position. It's going well until it isn't and where did the fireball come from. She doesn't remember much after that, only flashes. Captain's determined face, yelling orders in a desperate attempt to regain control of the situation. An Uchiha breathing out almost lazily, a perfect fireball escaping his lips. Ryo flinging kunai like they would never run out and maybe they wouldn't, she'd heard some interesting rumours about a secret jutsu. Above all though are the eyes. Red eyes whirling, studying, analysing, _copying_.  
   
Much later, she becomes aware of Mito's pale face hovering above her. She notices distractedly that Mito's perfect hair isn't so perfect now which is good because all the Uchiha had definitely had flawless hair especially the youngest one (and wasn't that such a trivial detail to remember) so if Mito's hair was less than pristine, she couldn't be an Uchiha in disguise after all. Somewhere in the middle of this, she realises she's hugging Mito and not crying, and Mito's hugging her back awkwardly. She murmurs something about Mito's stupid perfect hair into her shoulder and Mito giggles even though it makes no sense but that's all right.


End file.
